SAS slates High-Performance Analytics tool for December launch

Business intelligence firm SAS has confirmed that its High-Performance Analytics (HPA) product designed to allow businesses to carry out analytical queries on huge volumes of data will be available from December.

The vendor first announced the tool at an event in April in Las Vegas attended by V3 and has now confirmed that customers will be able to start using the system before the end of the year, which will launch with the firm's Data Mining tool as its first module.

SAS chief technology officer, Keith Collins, told V3 that the launch of the tool would usher in a new era of analytical capabilities by dramatically reducing the time it takes firms to run predictions and scenario modeling on large volumes of data.

"With the HPA businesses can carry out analysis on data in minutes that would previously take hours, preventing bottlenecks on their systems and helping improve analysis on issues such as customer behaviour or fraud detection," he said.

"We have one customer already using the technology for loan default predictions that has reduced its analyses from 20 hours to just 16 minutes using the Data Mining module on the HPA tool."

Collins explained that further modules for the tool would be available during the first quarter of 2012, although didn't specify which these would be.

He also revealed that early customers showing interest in the product had been asking SAS to manage the hosting of the service themselves in the cloud, a move which had surprised him.

"We thought customers would prefer on premise deployments but the majority of customers are using our hosting service instead which we offer in co-operation with a number of partners," he added.

The analytics giant also announced a series of new capabilities for its Conversation Centre tool that enables businesses to monitor and respond to comments about their brand or products drawn from social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook.